IN THE AFTERNOON SHE WENT OUT TO WORK IN THE GARden. She had planted peas and pole beans and tomatoes and squash and spinach. Rabbits were a problem, and groundhogs. Still, the futility of it all was not yet absolute. She would have had to ask someone to put up some sort of fence, and that would involve talking to someone, which she preferred not to do.
And after a few minutes there was Jack, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the garden, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I thought maybe you could put me to work out here.”
“Sure. I mean, you can put yourself to work. There’s so much that needs to be done. Well, you can see that. Mama had iris beds right up the hill—”
“I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”
“I just meant that might be a place to start. They’re so overgrown. Of course you used to live here.”
“—Strange as it seems—” He said it as if he were completing her thought, or sharing it.
They heard voices from the street, and a look of alarm or irritation passed over his face. Then he saw that it was a young man and a child passing by, taking no notice of them.
She said, “That’s Donny McIntire’s son. And his grandson. You might remember him. He was Luke’s age.”
“And good old Reverend Ames has a boy of his own, I understand.”
“Yes, he does. And a wife. Marriage seems to agree with him.”
He said, “What did people think of all that?”
“I guess there was some talk. But who could begrudge him. Papa has felt a little neglected. He and Ames used to spend so much time together.”
Jack dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it. “I’d better make myself useful,” he said, and went off to stand among the irises in his urban shoes and a fairly respectable white shirt with the creases of folding in it and light another cigarette. Their father came out to his chair on the porch, a project for him, a painful business. Now, with Jack there, he avoided help when he could, toiling dangerously up the stairs to shave himself with an unsteady hand. There was nothing to be done except to listen for the sounds of emergency and pray, and ignore the scruff of hair at the back of his head where his comb didn’t reach. From his chair in the porch he could look out on the garden.
Jack stooped to pull a clump of weeds and tossed it aside, and pulled another one and tossed it. Then he went to the shed behind the house to find a spade. When he came back, he said, “That DeSoto in the barn isn’t yours. It’s been there too long.”
“No, one of the boys left it for Papa. But he never really did start driving. I guess he had a license for a while. Years ago.”
“It looks like a decent car.”
“I tried to start it once.”
“You left the keys in the ignition.”
She nodded. “No safer place in the world for them.”
“Well,” he said, “a little gas in the tank might change that. A little water in the radiator. Some air in the tires. I wiped off the windshield to make the thing look less — humiliated. I thought I might roll it out into daylight for a couple of hours so I could get a better look under the hood. If that’s all right.”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would object.”
He nodded. “I wanted to be sure.” When he was done with his cigarette he began breaking up the ground.
He used to live here, and he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and the pride of that life, by local reckoning. But he spaded between the rows of irises and he was businesslike about it, too. He had rolled up his sleeves.
SHE HEARD HER FATHER CALL OUT, “SUPPER, JACK!” WHICH WAS an opinion he had formed on his own, since it was 4:15 and she had not begun to prepare anything. But Jack stood the spade in the ground and paused for a minute, looking at his hand. He walked to the porch, looking at it, and she heard her father say, “Let’s see! Oh yes, yes! Glory will take care of that! Glory? He has a splinter here. From that old spade handle! I don’t know how long we’ve had that spade! I should have said something! Glory?”
Jack said, “If I can borrow a needle, I can take care of it, I think.”
“No, no. That’s pretty deep, Jack!”
Her father’s face was animated with concern. He held to the wrist of Jack’s upturned hand and almost hurried along beside him. “We’ll put some iodine on that!”
Glory said, “You can wash up and I’ll disinfect a needle.”
“I’ll get the iodine!” the old man said, and launched a determined assault on the staircase.
Jack looked at her. “It’s just a splinter.”
She said, “Not much happens around here,” and he laughed.
She had made him laugh twice. She took a certain satisfaction in the joke about the towel, but in order to laugh at this little remark he must be feeling pretty kindly toward her, she thought. He was never one to laugh when you hoped he would, when other people would. In those old days, that is. He was a restless, distant, difficult boy, then twenty years passed with hardly a word from him, and now here he was in her kitchen, offering her his wounded hand, still damp with washing, smelling like lavender and lye. They sat at the table and she took his hand to steady it. A slender hand, still unsteady, with a few blisters rising on it from the work he had done that morning. Cigarette stains.
He noticed her scrutiny. “Do you read palms?” he asked.
“No. But if I did, I would say that you have a splinter through your lifeline.”
He laughed. “I believe you may have found your calling.”
She put the needle down. “I’m afraid to do this. It might actually hurt. And your hand is trembling.”
“Well, if that one is, so is the other one. I could do myself harm if I tried it, I suppose.”
“All right. Stay as still as you can.” She thought, If he really were a stranger, this would not seem so odd to me. She could hear his breathing. She could see the blue traces of blood under the white skin of his wrist. “Just a second — there.” She extracted the splinter easily enough.
“Thank you,” he said.
The cane and the creaky railing and the hard, slippery shoes, and their father hurried into the kitchen with a bottle of iodine and a spool of gauze.
“Yes, you’ll want to wash it and dry it again,” he said. Then he daubed iodine here and there, finally where it should have been.
Jack said, “Ow,” for old times’ sake, by the sound of it.
“Yes, but it is very effective!” Her father was afire with solicitude. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door and stood there, purposive. “Supper!” he said. “I believe the pies are missing!”
Glory said, “They were so old I put them over the fence for the Dahlbergs’ dogs.”
“You did? The way things go around here, it might be time to invest in a dog of our own!”